The Queen of Spades review — Tchaikovsky's chiller comes up trumps
A hall of foxed mirrors designed by Tom Piper enfolds the cast of Garsington Opera's new production of Tchaikovsky's chiller, the effect part Versailles, part haunted fairground. It's the first sign that Jack Furness's staging is something of a collector's item among productions of The Queen of Spades. We're actually in the period the composer imagined, the 1790s, in the St Petersburg of Empress Catherine the Great.
Tchaikovsky venerated Mozart, and Furness's insightful and pacey show is in some ways a kind of nightmare Marriage of Figaro, with aristocrats and underlings jockeying for position, acrimony seeping through a society of snobs, hypocrites and chancers. 'What is our life? A game!' the tormented antihero Herman will conclude at the tragic close. A game of cards, but also a game of dress-up, role play and buried identities.
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Furness's show — excuse the pun — really shows its hand in the Pastorale, a play within a play at the midpoint of the opera, featuring an increasingly risqué ballet (clever choreography by Lucy Burge) in which all kinds of seduction are on the cards. The cast start to reveal their true colours too: Robert Hayward's powerfully empathetic Tomsky — a character who usually is the wry, grizzled type — clearly has unfinished romantic history with the bottled-up Prince Yeletsky (Roderick Williams). Stephanie Wake-Edwards's forceful yet thwarted Polina is pining for Laura Wilde's Lisa. And who knows what the old Countess really means when she starts reminiscing about her youthful fraternising with Madame de Pompadour? Tchaikovsky (and for that matter his librettist brother Modest) both wrestled with repressed homosexuality, but whereas Covent Garden's last production of The Queen of Spades turned the entire show into a nightmare Freudian autobiography, Furness pulls these strings far more subtly.
So much for rococo spice. For all the Mozartian tints to his opera, however, Tchaikovsky's score practically throbs with anguish and ardour, and the propulsive playing of the Philharmonia — particularly its velvety strings — add the essential heat. Douglas Boyd's perceptive conducting is full of disconcerting details, including the eerie threnody that opens Act III.
The tormented Herman is a beast of a role. The forceful Aaron Cawley certainly chews into it — and then some — though by the end of the night the tenor was tending to wiry and strident. Wilde is an affecting, vocally polished Lisa, and (replacing Diana Montague at this performance) Harriet Williams caught the acidulous ennui of the Countess. Nobody sounded more polished, however, than Roderick Williams's heartfelt Yeletsky, who delivered his noble aria with memorable and moving grace.
★★★★☆
270min (includes dinner interval)
To July 4, garsingtonopera.org. To be broadcast on Radio 3 in October
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